[SXSW 2021 World Premiere Review] Sound Of Violence Comes Across As Tone Deaf

As the producer of 2015’s well-received documentary 808, about the famed TR-808 drum machine and the birth of electronic music, and the director of Conductor, a short horror film involving a music engineer, it seems safe to say that music is important to writer/director Alex Noyer. That trend continues with his feature film debut, a music-centric serial killer thriller called Sound of Violence. With style and music in the forefront, the film is a visual and audio treat that is let down by a perfunctory script that introduces heavy themes but doesn’t interrogate its main premise. 

As a kid, Alexis (Kamia Benget) was in an accident that briefly took her ability to hear. The cold open is set in 2002 and flits between the hearing members of her family and Alexis’ muted world. In a beautifully shot car ride, her mother (Dana L. Wilson) cranks up the volume and bass so Alexis can put her hand against the speaker and feel the beats vibrating through her body. We’re then introduced to her father (Wes McGee) who’s reduced to a PTSD war survivor who is introduced and then dispatched as he murders his wife before being bludgeoned to death by young Alexis. As she slams a meat tenderizer into his head, bursts of pinks and purples swirl and explode, colliding with the, ahem, sound of violence and she begins giggling.

Now an adult and a TA for a music professor, Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown) has regained her hearing and is obsessed with music and instruments, particularly the propulsive beats that provide the backbone for songs. “Sounds carry messages,” she says and while her class is bored with the prospect, she’s slowly becoming obsessed with the way sound can express stories. Her roommate and fellow music lover Marie (Lili Simmons) goes with her to record a dom/sub session where a mistress uses various items to whip her client while Marie and Alexis record the cracks and the screams of the man. As the sounds hit Alexis, she starts to see bursts of light that build to a seemingly ecstatic crescendo for her until the man taps out when a whip draws blood.

But Alexis wants more.

So she finds a homeless man and straps him to a Jigsaw-esqe murder device that’s connected to a drum machine. As she starts tapping out beats, the machine activates and cuts, slashes and bleeds the homeless man until he’s dead and she’s created a horrific symphony, ecstasy on her face and colors exploding while she murders him. Sound of Violence puts us in Alexis’ shoes as she goes from murder to murder to get the death/violent sounds she needs to create her music. When she plays the music she’s creating to her classmates, it’s met with confusion, horror and revulsion. They don’t know what she’s showing them and their revulsion should be that she hasn’t discovered some new celestial sounds...she’s just discovered industrial music.

Concurrently, the film also somewhat follows Detective Fuentes (Tessa Munro) as she discovers the bodies and attempts to find the murderer. And it’s here that the narrative starts to crumble. Sound of Violence’s structure feels reminiscent of the killer/detective narrative popularized in the 90s and revisited again with 2004’s Saw. That film, in particular, feels like a reference point as it presents Alexis’ murders as ridiculous traps; a theremin that can cause heads to explode and harps that can shred fingers. These moments are filled with the kind of over-the-top gore fans would probably expect from a film that quietly references Saw.

Alex Noyer and cinematographer Daphne Qin Wu frame the narrative beautifully, punctuating the music with flourishes of gross gore. Meanwhile, the important sound design is helped along by composers Alexander Burke, omar El-Deeb, Jaakko Manninen and mixed by Igor Parfenov and gives the film a unique edge. It’s a film you want to blast or listen with headphones on as it creates a nice fusion of audio and visual style. 

Unfortunately, the script fails the film. It attempts to craft an intriguing subversion of the straight, white male serial killer antihero films by focusing on the queer WOC Alexis. But by doing so, it unfortunately falls into the monstrous queer villains we’ve seen throughout the history of horror and thrillers. It tries to sidestep this by presenting a narrative that separates her queerness from the trauma she suffered, but the narrative cliches it falls into as the narrative has to come to an end push it back into the uncomfortable queer villain territory. The detective subplot, meanwhile,  is perfunctory and undeveloped to the point it almost feels like a farce. 

We’ve seen a number of films tackle the circular nature of trauma over the past few years and while Sound of Violence brings up a similar mantra, it does nothing to interrogate it. Instead, it simply states hurt people will hurt people and leaves it at that. Alexis could have been an intriguing character study of a traumatized woman who actually sees music and sounds and how that allure could be obsessive and destructive. And yet we’re given a character who has planned out her murder spree before the film even begins. It’s like the tail end of her downward spiral so it feels a bit gutted as a thematic exploration of trauma. 

It's unfortunate because from an audio-visual perspective, Sound of Violence should be a fun movie to watch. It’s just so clumsy on a narrative level in trying to balance an examination of trauma, a bloody, gore-filled serial killer narrative and a cursory detective story. By trying to be everything, it fails to do anything really well and while the ending attempts to build to some kind of musical opus as Alexis’, I guess, grand design comes together...it mostly comes across as tone deaf.